Building the Global Financial System with David Marcus - WBD721

David Marcus is CEO & co-founder of Lightspark, a
Lightning Network payments protocol. In this interview, we
discuss his career in the payments industry and former role
as head of Facebook's Libra project, his frustration with
the current financial system, how Lightspark is focusing on
addressing the challenges of the Lightning Network, the
potential impact of real-time payment systems and the
scalability of Bitcoin.


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David Marcus' journey into the payments industry began at
the age of 23 when he started his first company after
working at a bank. He built a successful telco company in
Switzerland and later started another company focused on
mobile payments. His journey took him to Silicon Valley,
where his company was eventually acquired by PayPal.


Despite his success, Marcus feels frustrated with the state
of payments and the lack of an open and interoperable
protocol for money on the internet. He believes that money
is an important aspect of people's lives and how they
measure success. He sees a lot of injustice in the current
financial system and feels passionate about improving it.


Our conversation covers David’s role in heading Facebook's
involvement in the payments space, particularly with the
development of Libra, a payment system designed to reach
billions of people. We talked about the challenges and
pushback the project faced, and how the Libra project was a
significant part of Marcus' journey in building his current
company, Lightspark.


David has come to the conviction that Bitcoin is the only
form of neutral internet money, which stems from his
experience trying to build a technology that could scale
and provide a stable form of digital money. He believes
that a real-time global payment systems, similar to sending
an email or text message, combined with the
decentralization and liquidity of Bitcoin, can unleash a
significant increase in global GDP. Scaling issues will be
a major challenge as adoption increases.


Lightspark seeks to help address these limitations by
focusing on the usability and operational challenges of the
Lightning network, such as liquidity management and route
finding. They have developed technology to simplify
Lightning's channel-based system, making it easier to spin
up and maintain Lightning Network nodes, allowing for
faster and cheaper bitcoin movement. There are also other
potential innovations that could greatly enhance Bitcoin’s
use as a payments rail.


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Show notes:
https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/building-the-global-financial-system


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